a feed that prioritizes notes based on likes,
a feed that prioritizes based on the number of Zaps
a feed that prioritizes based on the value of Zaps.
a feed where I can view people I have indicated an extra interest in.
I want to be able to flick between all four feeds, and I don't need any other algo.
How about no algorithm and the client provides us with control to structure our own feed the way we like. Humans take back control of the algos!
The above described feeds are so simple, transparent, and I think they'll capture everything I want from social media. Would love to experience it.
For sure and I agree with your ideas, but I would love to be in control of it.
Don’t worry the relays will filter events for you. They will have their own algos.
Only way to know they’re not doing that would be to receive *all* messages — and have a way to verify you got all messages.
Nostr doesn’t allow for that. So you have to just trust relays are not manipulating your feed.
History shows that is very unlikely to hold true for long.
As number of events grow into daily millions the incentive to discard most in a way users will not notice or care is tremendous.
Remember Twitter censorship grew out of its anti-spam efforts.
So then as a user I have to depend on and relays I trust, but can never truly verify?
Run your own relay then 🤷
Unless you convince everyone you follow to add your relay it makes no difference.
Unless all your followers add your relay you’ll lose reach
Sorry, but this is BS. Your relay allows you to choose what you see and if you are worried about censorship, shill your relay to those who matter.
Your relay isn’t magical. It only allows you to see what people post to it.
This would work if each user had a separate “home relay” and only posted there. Each client connect to as many relays as people you follow.
In practice pretty much everyone post to the same dozen relays, multiple relays at a time.
So these relays can easily manipulate what you see — no matter if you run your own relay.
If you decide only to post to your own relay, then people will likely never see it. If you post to other relays too then people will have little incentive to keep an expensive connection to yours (esp on their phones which is how 99% will ise Nostr).
Saying “use your own relay and shill it” is like saying “create your own platform” — completely impractical.
The problem has never been finding *somewhere* to host your content — the problem is if people will actually see it.
Nostr adds absolutely no new tech or incentive that didn’t exist 15 years ago when Twitter was becoming dominant — there’s just no breakthrough in it — and you can expect things to turn out exactly the same way unless some other thing that isn’t Nostr affects the outcome.
The *one* thing that is different this time is that now Lightning Network exists — if Nostr clients are faster to integrate LN reliably and attract users than legacy social media, that might change incentives enough to change the bigger picture— but that’s wild speculation, and again has nothing to do with Nostr specifically.
Nostr is just RSS but with JSON+WebSocket instead of XML+HTTP.
I think a fix for this would be inter-relay chatter. But mainly it’s your responsibility to connect to the people that matter to you.
First you need to know the people exist.
Same with twitter. You don't know what you don't know.
But all it takes is an article with one npub and you can follow all their followers in a second and enter a new universe of conversation.
You’re still limited to what people/relays/organizations you trust are willing to let you know about.
The internet was supposed to connect *everyone*.
I can see a future where after reinventing RSS people will realize they want to be able to find more than their tiny little social circles, so they will reinvent web directories, then web crawlers, PageRank, etc
Eventually we’ll have the whole web again! With exactly the same problems!
That’s how the world works. If you want to be connected to everyone, you drown in spam.
There is no way around building and curating your own network.
Such is life. No shortcuts. Only better and better tools to find the right people.
Exactly, no actual shortcuts in anything from my experience, just tools to make the process more fluent. Still, I see the shortcut idea constantly redressed and pushed aggressively, it feels absurd to me.
The rest already exists though, and can serve as a funnel to here. We don't need to reinvent it because it's not going anywhere. The question is: can Nostr provide something that wasn't available elsewhere or improve on the other options? I think it does.
I get that you have a hypothetical ideal that nostr doesn't meet, but for now this is a win.
Nostr doesn’t offer anything that wasn’t available before.
Does it offer the same things in a better way? Possibly. We’ll see.
To celebrate victory against the evil forces of censorship and brag about how Nostr will change the world — as most of the community seems to do — is just silly though.
I'm grateful to hear your perspective, and not in a condescending way. It sounds like you have a lot more experience than me.
BUT switch bitcoin for nostr in the above note and it looks like something I've read before.
Bitcoin was nothing like that when it was as early as Nostr is now.
The very people proposing it were skeptical of it, willing to hear about all possible limitations etc — and it was a breakthrough obvious to anyone who did any research around the idea of digital cash. Nostr obviously has no big breakthrough in it — there’s not even any attempt to make arguments in that direction— only about how it changes everything, assuming it solves the problem of censorship.
It reminds me not of Bitcoin, but of the way newborn altcoins are shilled with wild assertions and zero research to back it.
I was referring to the fact that no single part was new, but rather a new combination of older things.
So you're saying this combination exists elsewhere/ has existed before in a similar form and will become more centralised because it just can't scale (to include everyone in the world being easily discoverable by one another on the same relay) without massive resources.
I don't think that's what it's supposed to be though. I think we're fine with niche relays.
Bitcoin’s genesis occurred in a very different time, and was nurtured and developed by individuals who had a deep understanding of the tech involved.
Imagine if bitcoin was discovered now. Would it take the same path? Who knows?
I’m thankful for devs like yourself, who take a contrarian view, and take the to educate and inform people like myself, who have a deep desire to see change but lack the deep technical knowledge to truly assess if this time is different.
In my view the novelty of Nostr is the concept of relays. All they do is forward content there is no guarantee to store it. I’m not aware of any similar architecture previously? Mostly because people assumed that you would also need to archive the content.
In terms of censorship, with Twitter it is difficult to create an alternate. So you have platforms like Gab and Getter which reinvent the wheel from scratch.
There is a market for censorship resistance. With Nostr if people get wind that a relay is censoring, they can use the same client and open source relay software to gather around their own relays. It already happened with Gab, etc. and will be far easier with Nostr.
Yes relays can always censor, but we might be able to have detection mechanisms. For example if a group ran private relays, they could compare the private relay feed with the public one. If there is a difference they can raise the alarm and gather around a new relay.
I think this is far better than the existing social networks.
I think the euphoria over nostr speaks more to the utter need and desire for people to connect in an authentic way free from manipulation. There’s hope that this can be it, but I can see why you are saying, whoa let’s think about this. It’s nice to hear counter arguments. Often times we get our hopes up, and ignore the lessons of the past, and fail to account for things that could go wrong along the way.
I think you are just overly negative. Nostr solves all the problems with classical social media.
You are IMO strawmaning here, holding it to an impossible standard that I never heard anybody else hold it to.
Zaps shouldn't be used for ranking until they can fix some of the easily exploitable things.
If we are using zaps to measure quality and value of a post to show users. I can easily spin up an alt and tip my own note at very low cost to myself. A few sats in routing fees..
It's not special to nostr or zaps. Any system that has the ease of entry and acct creation like nostr has/will face similar issues.
I have faith these brainiacs figure something out.
Just my 2 sats.
Zaps are cool, but they can, in their current state, be gamed.
Someone games it and we stop following them. Right? Just like any other form of being a cunt or attention seeking/ annoying behaviour.
Yeah but will you know it's been 'gamed'.
As someone else said yeah you can look at the profile that is zapping to check legitimacy of acct and whatnot. But if there is a point where a feed is 'ranked' by zaps. It could put a lot of spam in there by boosting their own junk.
Just being devils advocate here. Love the idea and how zaps work. But no one is doing the good ole SWOT
Also if bob is constantly zapping Alice. On every content for absurd amounts we can probably derive bob and Alice are one in the same
I see what you're saying, but if I keep seeing shit from someone I'll just unfollow them. Doesn't matter if they're gaming it... gaming it so they appear on my feed more often is just them paying to remind me to unfollow them.
Touche
Also been pondering on this.. no conclusions reached, but something poking at me about seeing the total amount shown.. perhaps total # of zaps better, although I know that's basically like Likes, tho also not, because effort and actual value is given with each zap
Idk, it's something about recreating a popularity culture and longing to avoid that here, while obvs wanting to acknowledge real value..
Love to hear thoughts..
I think the social aspect will weed it out on an individual level like shire and Derek said. The indivual user will just unfollow or block that acct once noticed. But the ease of firing up keypairs could make it a constant battle.
Only time will tell
We will figure it out. I have no doubts.
How would I even see their stuff unless they're doing some kind of annoying dick reply guy thing on my notes? Those peeler get bored anyway.
What if it's personalized based on how much you zap the poster? That can't be cheated and it's directly relevant to you.
I was desiring the exact same thing. If any open source nostr clients developers read this, please, attach the link to the repository.
